By submitting your personal information, you agree to receive emails regarding relevant products and special offers from TechTarget and its partners. You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.

Solidarity is a 3U dual-controller system that scales from 3.5 TB to 13.5 TB of MLC solid-state
drives (SSDs) from STEC Inc. GreenBytes claims Solidarity’s effective capacity can run from 15 TB
to 60 TB with deduplication and compression. The company also says its system can deliver 120,000
4K IOPS. The system is aimed at small enterprises that are heavily virtualized.

GreenBytes CEO Bob Petrocelli said he sees Solidarity as an alternative to midrange hard drive
arrays rather than a high-priced, high-performance option.

“Our goal isn’t to be one of those flash vendors who want to operate in the enterprise as tier
0,” he said. “We’re not Fusion-io, Texas Memory or Violin that will roll out a Ferrari box that
achieves other-world IOPS. Our objective is to replace magnetic disk with solid-state storage for
the mainstream, and to make it cost effective. We take low-cost NAND storage, and take it as close
to the capacity and cost of magnetic storage as we can with the clear advantages for random read
and write performance that flash brings.”

Petrocelli said the list price will start at under $100,000 for a 13.4 TB system. He expects the
systems to begin shipping in March.

GreenBytes uses only higher-cost SLC SSD in its other storage systems, but claims Solidarity’s
Smart Write technology manages writes to the array to extend MLC beyond its typical write endurance
life. Solidarity includes 48 GB RAM cache, two high-performance single-SLC SSDs for log drives and
MLC drives for bulk storage. Petrocelli said the SLC SSDs logs writes as they come in and pass them
off to the RAM drives, which sort them out to the MLC flash.

Storage Strategies Now analyst Jim Bagley said GreenBytes’ data
reduction makes it a player to watch among all-flash storage and hybrid flash storage vendors.
“GreenBytes is focused on density and hardware-based compression to make its box competitive,” he
said. “Their claim is they’re price-competitive to high-RPM Fibre Channel arrays.”

GreenBytes previously launched the X-Series
for primary storage and backup for SMBs, as well as the dual-controller HA3000
primary storage system. Those systems use SSDs and hard drives in hybrid
architectures.